OMGPOP Cofounder Living 'the Life' 2 Years After Zynga Acquisition

Charles Forman didn't think Zynga would actually buy his company. OMGPOP had fielded "a lot" of acquisition offers and investment opportunities before talks with Zynga approached their final stages.

"It was a stressful time because deals fall apart, deals fall through," Forman recalled to Mashable last month in an interview for a larger story about founders following up successful startups. "I was just certain that the deal was going to fall through."

But on March 21, 2012, Zynga announced that it had acquired OMGPOP, "makers of the popular cultural hit mobile game, Draw Something." The price tag for the deal was reported to be around $200 million. Forman had already moved on to a new startup by that point, though he remained on OMGPOP's board and personally gained tens of millions of dollars from the deal.

Two years after the acquisition, Forman's life is more or less the same. He lives in the same one-bedroom apartment and wears the same clothes as he did back then, though he has used some of that money to pursue more creative projects, including working on a script for a movie.

OMGPOP, on the other hand, has changed significantly. "It doesn't exist," Forman says bluntly. Zynga laid off most of the OMGPOP staff last year and shut down the New York office.

Forman chatted with Mashable by phone about his thoughts on the mobile gaming space, how the Zynga deal did (or didn't) change his life and why he decided to spend most of his time now working on writing a movie script. Here is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

Q&A With Charles Forman, Cofounder of OMGPOP

Mashable: It has been nearly two years since Zynga acquired your company. How has your life changed since then?

Forman: Dude, if you could see me now: I am in the same f*cking one-bedroom tenement apartment that I've lived in for the past six years in New York. I wear the same f*cking clothes. It's not even a one bedroom, its one of those railroad things. I have a bathroom so small that you have to sit down sideways to poop. This is the life! But I don't give a sh*t about that sort of stuff.

So basically no change whatsoever for you?

Forman: I think people think that your life is different, but it's not really any different. I think it was just sort of a trip to see stuff on the news and since then there have been far bigger acquisitions that don't really get that much attention at all ... If you're the type of person that just makes stuff, having some sort of windfall, all it means really is that you can no longer use the limitation of not having money as an excuse not to do sh*t that you should probably be doing.

After the OMGPOP acquisition, you dabbled in investing a bit. What ever happened with that?

Forman: People were like, "You gotta invest in stuff." At first, I was like, I want to listen to peoples' pitches and I want to be on the other side of the table in those types of situations. And then I realized that that whole life is sh*tty and those people should kill themselves. I care more about my own problems and my own ideas... If you invest in stuff, all that does is, outside of money, it takes up your time. You're thinking about this thing that is not yours and you can't have direct control over and you don't really have any impact on whether it succeeds or fails. I just thought that I'm just going to try to make as many things as I can that I want to before I die.

And apparently one of those thing is a movie? How did that come about?

Forman: I had an irrational thought that I could write a movie, and then I would will a movie into existence. I told everyone else that was around me about it and they thought it was a good idea. Maybe they're just all lying to me.

Everyone talks about doing sh*t all the time, but if I don't do it I'm an a**hole. I'm going to attempt to do this knowing full well how it looks. I think its a little cliché: somebody makes some money and they're like, "I want to make a movie." But honestly it's a ton of work.

I admit I'm a little afraid to ask this, but: What exactly is the movie about?

Forman: It's hard to describe, really. What I'm trying to create is one of those sense of wonder movies of the 80's — my favorite movies like Goonies and Explorers and Flight of the Navigator and stuff like that. What I'm attempting to build is like a sense of wonder movie that in the '80s would have been made for kids, like ET or something like that, but instead it's sort of young adult. The story is good, but at the same time, if I cannot get a script worth shooting, I have no problem jettisoning this and doing another project.

There has been plenty of talk about the volatility of online gaming companies like Zynga, OMGPOP and now King, which is about to go public. What, if anything, can these businesses do to prosper in such a hits-based industry?

Forman: There's never going to be a diminishing demand for high-quality content. People will continuously want to play high-quality games that are fun. No one will ever be like, "There are just too many good games out there, I just can't choose which one to play." That's not a problem anyone has.

I think the problem is that you need a staff that has a genuine care about what they're building and what they're putting their love into. When you create a situation where there's no love being put into the products you built, stuff starts to slip.

Do you think OMGPOP would have been better off if you or your team had continued running it, rather than selling to Zynga?

Forman: Those things are unhealthy because ultimately the answer is always "of course." There's no situation where somebody's company was acquired and you're like, "They took my company and turned it into something amazing."

Let me ask a slightly different question then: Do you think another one of the companies that approached OMGPOP might have ended up running it better?

Forman: The answer is yes. But that is a thought experiment that doesn't have any merit.

What advice would you give to others just entering the startup world?

Forman: Do what you love and put what you love into what you do and people will feel it. My biggest concern with all these up and coming little b*tches: I see these kids from Stanford Business School, I see these kids from Princeton who come out and they are able to raise a small amount of money and they don't have an intrinsic feeling for how to build a product. All they see is the potential dollar signs. It sort of makes me a little sick, especially considering that there are probably many people who are better at product and better at bringing really great things into this world, but people who are a little less slick than those types of people.

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